Horrible Thoughts Reviews: The Dead Room

Hello fiends, I hope you're all recovered from the terrible excesses of the festive period. Well, I said I'd start doing reviews here a while back but New Year seems like a good place to begin, so let's open with a short seasonal tale before I get stuck into the backlog of other spooky media I want to talk about.

The Dead Room - A Ghost Story for Christmas was this year's entry in BBC4's series of seasonal spookiness, courtesy of writer and director Mark Gatiss. Gatiss seems to have entrenched himself as the channel's go-to for all things horror, having penned a number of previous Christmas Eve ghost stories as well as two excellent documentary series on the history of horror cinema. The Dead Room, which stars the delightful Simon Callow as the aging host of the eponymous radio show, gives Gatiss another chance to wax lyrical about the art of ghost stories, with a cheeky lecture from Callow's snobbishly verbose Aubrey Judd about the rules of "a proper ghost story", blissfully unaware that he is in one.

Unfortunately this isn't nearly as scary as the various tales Aubrey references in his little speech but it's still a nicely atmospheric experience. There's a good build of tension and some excellent characterisation in the first half, I really appreciated the subtle sound design and the slow push into tight close ups as Aubrey lapses into moments of hallucinatory unease. The choice to set the piece in a radio studio is particularly ingenious. With just a subtle change of lighting, this simple set goes from cozily intimate to eerie and lonely, cut off by the sound proofing.

And what of the terrible past haunting poor pompous Aubrey? Well, that would be telling, but suffice it to say that I definitely have a soft spot for queer horror stories and this gives a nice, if somewhat predictable twist, on one of my favourite tropes: the supernatural horror born of bigotry. Besides that, I never thought I'd hear "S-s-s Single Bed" by Fox, an utterly bonkers British disco track, in a ghost story but it's a perfect choice for a back-story in the heat wave of 1976.

Honestly the only thing that really lets this story down is a rather weak ending shock, but if you're in the mood for 30 minutes of atmospheric character-driven creeps, and a genuinely affecting performance from Simon Callow, you could do a lot worse than check this one out. It's on iPlayer for another 15 days at the time of writing and isn't directly linked to Christmas, despite the time of its initial broadcast.

Three-and-a-half haunted radio stations out of five.